FanPop Asks 'What Are You a Fan Of?'

My earliest memory of being a kid in the Philadelphia Area is "Wee Willie Webber's Colorful Cartoon Club'. As I recall, it was a sort of club -- you could write in an get a membership card and all that, but they called it a club because people like to be part of something.

And not just kids. So, with all my Obama talk on this blog, you might think that I was always a Dem. But ACTUALLY, I did an internship at the RNC when I was a wee one, working in their direct mail department. And the RNC was king of clubs -- the Ronald Reagan Victory Club, the Golden Eagles Club, it was all designed to make people feel empowered and part of a group.

With all this web bruhaha, you might think clubs were dead. Nope. Not by a longshot. And FanPop is a remarkable site designed to be your starting point to find, join, and communicate with clubs on anything -- and I mean ANYTHING -- that you might be interested in.

Here's how they describe themselves:

Loads of people are using this site -- I went to check out the group about one of my favorite TV shows -- House, and there are almost 7,000 participants in that group alone. There are 6000 for the US The Office, and so on.

On this site you can read and make posts, upload and watch videos, post and check out links, view and share photos, and participate in many other ways by sharing and consuming content.

Here's how they describe themselves:

It's tough to keep up with the world wide web when it keeps getting bigger and bigger each day. Wouldn't it be great if someone organized the web into topics you care about? We thought so too, so we created FanPop. FanPop is the one-stop destination for real people with real passions to find real content and community. Remember when the web was small enough that you could look at a directory of the best sites on the web for a certain area of interest? We missed those days, but felt like the community should be the editors who contribute and decide what the best content on the web for a given topic should be. We like to think of FanPop as the next generation of fansites created for the fans by the fans. It's a one-stop destination for fans of anything and everything and the place to find fellow devoted fans. We wanted to make discovering and sharing content fun, easy and social.

You can tell that the people who created this site are very passionate. One proof of this is that there are but four people behind this massive collection of content.

According to their site, the stats are impressive:

2,000,000+ monthly uniques (and growing)
3,000,000+ monthly visits
22,000,000+ monthly pageviews
Users average 7 pvs/visit
Users average 7 min/visit
Gender ratio - 55% female : 45% male
Over 90% of the audience is 13-34 years old (75% are between the ages of 13-24)
95% are surfing with broadband connections
10% of the audience visits 51 or more times/month

Their audience is also global -- about half of their traffic comes from North America, and a third from Europe. The remainder comes from Asia and Australia.



With all of the different groups available here, the opportunity to do highly targeted contextual and demographic advertising is definitely there. The basic ad sizes area available, as well as promotions, interstitials, and video ads.

Check out FanPop. It's definitely worth a visit.

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.